Thursday, July 12, 2007

Dayang-Dayang

:)

i heard the song dayang-dayang on the radio, and it just made me smile.
dayang-dayang is an indonesian song (i think) that made it to the top hits in the philippines around the late 90's. it became a popular dance song ... i was really annoyed that time, i felt they bastardized the song!

see, back in highschool (just BEFORE the song and the likes of it became a hit) i danced the pangalay, the tausug wedding dance. pangalay is usually danced to the tune of dayang-dayang (and alike genre). daddy was really excited about it. he got a copy of indonesian songs and for several nights our house back in saudi was filled with beats like this as we selected which song i'd dance. :) daddy danced the woman's part just to teach me, funny! he was dancing in his long johns!! hahahaha! he also works a materials engineer in a laboratory, so he thought that instead of using the usual fake looooooooong fingernails made of foil, he'd craft really good looking ones in his laboratory. just before the day i was going to dance in public, he brought home the most beautiful faux gold long fingernails :) (i soooooo wish i kept those, one by one i lost them! huhuhuhu). my mom, on the other hand, was in charge of finding the best fabric so i would have the perfect tausug costume. and it was. :) the day i danced, my mom gave me a beautiful pearl necklace which we placed on top of my head. :)

the biggest trick in the dance was to look as taray as possible, as in bawal mag-smile. that wasn't so hard. i'm good at that. and like daddy said, my hands should be stretched out to the maximum so that my fingers curled upwards. i remember just how he demonstrated it to me. :)

when i danced, everyone else blacked out. it was just me, my costume, the music and the lights. it was almost as though i fell in a trance. i got off-track a bit when someone came up the stage and placed money in my clothes. and then another. i was as poker-faced as i could be, even if i so wanted to see just how much they put. see, that's how pangalay is, you dance and people put bills in your clothes. (no, it's NOT like an exotic dance, and it's NEITHER degrading, that's just how tradition works). i earned SR250 that night(conversion to peso is around P1,500!!).

so there.

i always believed i'd never be able to do that again. THEN i met ibn, a tausug. one day he told me how his mom was really good at this dance. that was it, i fantasized then if we'd get married his mom would dance for us, that knowing she's good is enough reason for me to just ... hands down!

when i heard dayang-dayang just now, i felt like dancing to it again.

hmmmmm....

ok, i think i want to do it again. but this time not just for cultural purposes. i want to do it again, when ibn and i get married (fingers crossed) and maybe i'll ask ibn's mom to teach me. i imagine we'd be able to bond and break down any "in-law barriers" if any, over that. :)

but this time, when i dance that song, hmmmm.... i think i might get ibn to dance the man's part (again, fingers crossed, hehehe). he was, after all, quite keen on the cotillion dance last march. :)

**** dayang-dayang, dayang-dayang, dayang-dayang ****
(my darling!)

:D

Labels: giddy, nostalgic

Posted by xam :: Thursday, July 12, 2007 :: 0 Comments:

Post a Comment

---------------------------------------